An article was recently published by Business Insider titled “Southwest asking corporate employees to work at airports; staffing”. https://www.businessinsider.com/southwest-asking-corporate-employees-to-work-at-airports-staffing-shortages-2021-12?op=1
It seems that the article is implying that operational employees no longer want to work at Southwest Airlines. In a free market society laborers usually don’t want to leave the stability of their workplace unless there is a reason. I don’t know why Southwest Airlines employees are leaving but based on reasons people typically do leave their employment it could be because of things like hostile working conditions, unfair compensation policies, or a threat against their safety.
So we know that something is causing a mass exodus of employees at Southwest Airlines. And it is a big enough issue that people who would otherwise remain in a stable, employed position are willing to disrupt their lives because of it.
From a corporate accountability standpoint, where consumers hold publicly traded shares in the company, this mass exodus should probably trigger some sort of corporate policy reform. There should be corporate accountability for how executives are directly causing employees to leave in mass at a publicly traded company.
But instead, according to the article, corporate executives are instead asking mid-level employees to “volunteer” to work for free. And yes, this DOES sound like a massive overstep of power. We have no way to know that the “volunteers” are not being coerced to “volunteer” out of fear. This fear might be driven from fear of losing their job, fear of not getting a promotion, fear of executive leadership choosing to run the entire company to the ground rather than reform their policies, or other reason.
I am curious though if the CEO “volunteered” to work any of these 8 hour shifts.
So here are some interesting things to consider. Southwest airlines is a publicly traded company and average middle class U.S. citizens do hold some of those shares. I’m sure that employees of Southwest Airlines also own shares of the company’s stock. So according to how our capital markets are supposed to be working, Southwest’s executive leadership should be aligning corporate policy with the best interest of its shareholders. But the shareholders (i.e. employees) are leaving, possibly being censored in the media, and the remaining employees are working for free.
In a world where corporate accountability was paramount, don’t you think the ideal response of a publicly traded company to be:
That it changes it’s policies that are making operational laborers uncomfortable?
That it changes it’s leadership which is pushing policies that operational laborers are uncomfortable with?
In a society where corporations were held accountable, I believe the results would be dramatically different. Mid-level employees would probably be paid for the work they are performing instead of “volunteering” to work for free over the holidays. Operational laborers would be able to keep the financial stability of the job they have held for however many years. And middle class consumers wouldn’t see the value in their investment decline as the company loses money over unpopular policies.
